“The cinema is courage./ The cinema is development of strength./ The cinema serves the distribution of ideas./ But the cinema is sick./ Capitalism has thrown a handful of gold in its eyes.”--Vladimir Mayakovksy, quoted by the Centofiori Cooperative.
La Macchina Cinema is the most thorough attempt at debunking the myth of cinema glamour since Kenneth Anger's “Hollywood Babylon.” A cooperative effort by four Italian directors - Marco Bellocchio, Silvano Agosti, Sandro Petraglia, and Stefano Rulli - it focuses not on the cinema's “success stories,” but on the cinema as a drug, and on its hopeless addicts. Ironic, tragicomic, sometimes cruel, it is constructed in episodes, each of which systematically recreates, then destroys, the cinema myth. They include a look at makers of soft-porn who are convinced that they are making art films, a secretive keeper of cinema journals, a super-8 entrepreneur, and an actress who finds that being a hotel maid is less degrading than playing the roles she has been offered. The strongest section is devoted to actress Daniela Rocca, star of Divorce--Italian Style, whose career went to pieces after that film, and she along with it. The directors' approach to their subject admits to their own direct involvement; seeking to answer questions regarding the lure of cinema, they had intended to make a film about those who had turned their back on the machine. But they found that “even those who have been worst treated, even the most radical and the most politicized admit a frustrated but living love for the film camera and in many cases a deep longing for the cinema....”
The Centofiori Cooperative, formed in 1974, unites two filmmakers - Bellocchio (In the Name of the Father, The Seagull, Fists in the Pocket, etc.) and Agosti - with two film critics - Petraglia and Rulli - interested in the theoretical problems of the documentary film. Their 1975 documentary, Fit to Be Untied, screens Tuesday, May 25.